Author: Sasha Zbrozek

  • Some pictures from the workplace at TAFE

    In case you didn’t click Ben’s shameless plug, here are some immediately accessible pictures from the workshop in North Coburg. The guys there were fantastically helpful and remarkably happy to lend us their spare space. Aside from the security guard, everybody was extremely cheerful. We met lots of students, teachers, and administrators and tried to…

  • “Care” Park – my foot!

    America has a reputation for having dishonest multinationals and greedy corporations. It seems Australia is at least as bad. Here in Melbourne there’s a shady car parking chain called “Care Park”. They operate lots with spots smaller than normal sized vehicles and with passageways too small to enter or exit spots with spotters on both…

  • Boat delayed by fog, tsunami, or whatever

    We just got bad news from our shipping company. It seems that some bad weather has delayed our car’s arrival. While we might still get it in time for the race, it’s eating in tremendously on our testing time and increasing our cost of living. If nothing else goes wrong we’ll be on the road…

  • A quiet day in the city

    We had a fairly uneventful day in the city. Several of us headed off to the library to score some free bandwidth, doing everything from software development to video chat. We finally got around to designing our array stand, which I think someone on the team nicknamed SARS – the solar array repositioning system. Our…

  • SSCP in Melbourne, Australia!

    Most of us are in Australia! While still waiting on our guest, Lucas Wilkerson, everyone from the Stanford team has made it into Melbourne. It’s an attractive looking city – well groomed, with a nice mix of old and new buildings. A heritage architecture law prevents a lot of demolition. Here’s a picture of a…

  • Array encapsulation

    A lot of people told us that encapsulating our own array would not end well. That remains to be seen, things went pretty well for us so far. We chose to do it with TPU rather than EVA. It’s tougher and it doesn’t crosslink. That means you can remelt it and rework the laminate as…

  • SSCP featured on Wired.com front page

    There’s a really great photoset on the Wired.com front page featuring our shop and car. Chuck did a great job asking really good questions and writing up responses that are neither dumbed down nor hard to understand. If all goes well and we go to the wind tunnel at NASA Ames, Chuck will come by…